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Wednesday, January 26, 2005

I Love my iPod Mini

My iPod Mini looks like this one.

I bought my iPod Mini from the Apple Store at Arden Mall in Sacramento last September. I filled it with my favorite tunes, yes, the ones I grew up with. The 4GB harddisk is okay with me since I don't find the need to tote along all my music. It's great especially during my daily two hour commute to work as it blocks off all the undesirable noise in public transport like gossiping fellow passengers, Pinoy DJs trying to sound like Americans; I'm sure you get the picture!

I also bought a Sennheisser MX450 to even enhance my listening experience. It improved the bass sound.

I also used the iTunes AAC format to compress my music. There's a little quality loss but I can live with it. Applelossless is very good but it eats up a lot of HD space. That makes MP3 still the best format to compress your music to make them portable. Of course had I bought the full sized iPod with a 20 or 40 GB harddisk, space won't be a problem at all.

One of the things I love about my iPodMini is it's so easy to use! The click-wheel is a work of genius. You can smoothly change music by the flick of your thumb. What more, you can create an instant playlist through the On-The-Go menu. There is no way you can get bored with your music because you can surprise yourself by turning on the Shuffle mode.

I only have one little neg comment about this thingamajig --- battery life! The blurb says battery life is good for 8 hours for one charging cycle. The longest I've had is a mere 5 hours. And I need 3 hours to get a full charge!!! Beware, the battery is easily used up if you keep on pushing the forward button. The website explained that it has something to do with the cache memory; the iPod saves the next song in its cache and if you forward the song, the cache needs to store another song. This process eats up a lot of the battery's energy. So to avoid this from happening, I use the On-the-Go playlist a lot.